Post Jobs on Facebook, Beat Facebook Science.

I love it. I love using the social graph search tool to source folks. I love posting jobs on Facebook. And I love looking up my ex-boyfriends to make sure my life is better than their life. Admit it, you do that, too.

I’ve listened to Facebook employees speak about Edgerank. If you’re posting jobs on Facebook, you need to pay attention to this. I’m going to teach you how to get the most bang for your buck and get those job posting seen by the masses!

Edgerank = Facebook Science

This is the formula for Edgerank:

What the what?!

Okay, so here’s the deal. Facebook isn’t going to show your post unless you beat their science.

Affinity

Affinity just means people you interact with often, or who interact with you, will see your stuff on Facebook.

There’s a lot of things you do not see on Facebook, simply because Facebook doesn’t think you’re very close friends, or they don’t think you really care about that particular business page.

Weight

Weight is how Facebook decides the popularity of your post.

How many likes does the post have? Are there comments on the post? How many people have clicked the link? Are people checking into a business? Are they sharing this post?

Is this a business page posting? Did the business pay to “boost” the post? They didn’t? It had better get a lot of organic action. Because Facebook? They need to make money.

But even more than that, Facebook ranks certain types of posts higher than others. Pictures rank higher than links, which rank higher than plain text. Third party uploads (like from YouTube or Hootsuite) rank the lowest. Facebook likes you to directly upload your content to their site.

Decay

How old is the post? How much time has passed?

Time passed means you’re being pushed to the bottom of the newsfeed.

You Can Beat Facebook Science

1. Post pictures! If there is a link to the job posting, add that in the text part of your post, but make sure you always have a picture.

3. Stop posting jobs from third party apps like Hootsuite! Physically log into Facebook and give them fresh content.

4. Ask people to share your posting! When we have job openings, I ask our employees to share the Facebook posting. They are happy to help because if their Facebook friend is the one I hire, they get a $1,000 recruiting bonus. Money talk, you guys!

5. “Boost” posts on your business page! It doesn’t cost much to reach people who like your page and their friends.

Winning Facebook Job Posting

I made this picture using PicMonkey. It’s a free service. You just upload your photo, and you can write on it. It’s really easy to use.

I then uploaded the photo directly to our company Facebook page, and I tagged myself and some managers in the post (even ones who are not hiring). I paid $20 to “boost” the post to the friends of fans of our page.

The total number of people who saw this post (in less than 24 hours) was 5,552. Of that, I paid for 3,724 of those views. So I could just pay for it and walk away, but since I tagged people and used a photo, the photo had an extra 1,828 organic views. It was “liked” 24 times and “shared” 19 times. Not bad for a fan page of a car dealership!

So that’s it! That’s how you beat Edgerank!

Do you have any Facebook tips for job postings? Will you try this? Hit me in the comments!

FOT Background Check

Meredith Soleau was supposed to be a famous country singer, but her parents made her go to college and major in something “real.” She graduated with a B.S. in Business from the University of Toledo, and landed a gig as a Human Resources Director at a large car dealership in Ohio. After eight years of HR at a car dealership, she burned out, decided to sell cars herself, and has since launched her agency, where she specializes in finding blue-collar workers. Clearly she has plenty of stories. But the best stories are probably about Meredith, herself. Read them on her personal blog, meredithsoleau.com, where she holds nothing back.
Follow Meredith on Twitter. Become her friend on Facebook. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

4 Comments

I’d love to know how you managed to get Facebook to boost that particular post. They have a rule, in my case ruthlessly enforced, that if the text on a picture exceeds 20% (or maybe it’s 25%) they won’t boost the post. The picture above has a lot higher text to pic ratio than anything they rejected on me. Well done.

My spouse and I stumbled over here coming from a different page and thought I might as well check things out.
I like what I see so now i’m following you. Look forward to checking out your weeb page repeatedly.